Anything You Say Can and Will Be Used Against You by Laurie Lynn Drummond

in time, turned the steering wheel hard to the left to deflect the impact. Metal thuds, scrapes and screeches, the downpour of shattering glass. There was a time lapse of sound, as though I heard everything two seconds after it actually happened.
    My body was whipped left to right, something sharp entered my knee, my calf, my ankle; then I was whipped to the left again. There were jolts back and forth, until my unit came to a stop in the intersection. Dazed, I lay against the door, head down.
    Dimly I reminded, then demanded my muscles to relax. I needed to get on the radio, get units and an ambulance out here; I needed to get out of my car, check on the other driver. After a moment, my hands unclenched the steering wheel. My leg muscles loosened and the pain, the pure white piercing pain rushed in and took my breath away again.
    I moved my head slowly to the right and studied a shoe on the floorboard, near the radio console. The sunlight was bright and the shoe, a black Red Wing just like mine, appeared three-dimensional, popping out of a flat background; everything surrounding it was flat. It was bloody, the shoe. I should have been able to smell that blood, it looked so real.
    I looked at the leg attached to the shoe. It was familiar, yet not. Someone’s leg was twisted around and wet-white bone poked out, a good inch jutting forth, sharp and foreign to the air.
    Then everything happened too fast. People talking, running up. “Ambulance,” I heard. “I’ve called the police.” “Doesn’t look good.” And, “Oh God, she’s bleeding too.”
    I couldn’t seem to move, my head too big, my arms numb and detached. I whispered to a figure standing near my window, “The other person?”
    â€œDon’t you worry,” a voice said.
    But I insisted, mumbling the question over and over. Finally, the voice told me the other driver was just fine. Later I learned she died on impact, face through the windshield, skin peeled back like the husk off corn. Traffic investigators determined her shoe had been wet, slipped off the brake pedal and punched the accelerator instead.
    She wasn’t wearing a seat belt. But then neither was I. Neither was that boy out on the interstate. I wonder if it would have made a difference for either of them.
    Something about that boy’s accident has stuck with me, although I’ve worked other accidents just as bad. Cops remember most calls they work; I remember every murder, every suicide, every fatality, andit colors everything I do. But you compartmentalize and joke those calls into a tame and distant place. I can’t find a place for that boy.
    Anyway, enough stories. It happened long ago, in another life.
    In this life, I walk with a limp and have blinding, white-pain headaches. The doctors tell me I’ll recover fully, some day. My sister says I’m lucky. She says I need to move on, suggested I take classes at the university and get my degree. And so here I am, surrounded by vibrant young men and women; when I meet them in classrooms or walking under the live oaks that dominate the campus, I study their faces and look at the shadings and depths within their eyes. I am glad to be among them, although I have no idea what or who I’ll be in this new life.
    I try to avoid that stretch of interstate, but it’s hard. This is a small city, and when I find myself there, especially at night, I feel him again, warm between my hands. I’ve been thinking about going out west—maybe Idaho or Colorado. Someplace where the sky embraces you and the hours are slower. I’ve been reading about firewatchers, people who sit up in these rickety little cabins all summer, high above the rustling trees, searching for signs of smoke. I like the idea of that.

M ONA
    The truth is rarely pure and never simple.
    â€”Oscar Wilde

U NDER C ONTROL
    This is what I see the first second into the room: The hands of the three men are